by Barry Lyga
He stepped into the circle and crouched down by Madame Xanadu. He took her hands in his own. Her strength was incredible as she clutched his hands like a lifeline hurled from a distant shore.
“Dead! She’s dead! No! No! What will we do?” She opened her tear-flooded eyes, and he saw stars in them, whirling and flashing lights that mesmerized him for a moment before he blinked rapidly and returned to reality.
“You’re OK,” he promised her. He tossed a reassuring look over his shoulder at the other cops, who relaxed visibly. “You’re fine. Who’s dead?”
She made a long, monosyllabic sound of disbelief, a sort of nnnnnnnnnnnnnnn that felt forever long. Shivering all over, she shook her head back and forth—whether denying him or her own thoughts, he couldn’t tell.
Then, a moment of lucidity: She snapped her head forward, fixed his gaze with her own, and said, “Me. I am. I’m dead.”
3
With Captain Singh’s blessing, Barry transported Madame Xanadu to S.T.A.R. Labs. “There’s a reason we have a contract with them,” Singh said. “Let them earn that big fat retainer we pay them every month.”
Joe helped Barry walk Madame Xanadu down to the garage, then stood lookout while Barry popped open his ring and slipped into the rapidly expanding Flash costume.
“Can you carry her all the way there?” Joe asked.
“She’s pretty light,” Barry said, slinging her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. “And I’ve been working out.”
After that single moment of lucidity, Madame Xanadu had relapsed. She alternated between babbling and outright screaming. Barry told S.T.A.R. that he was on his way and ran.
The S.T.A.R. Labs building looked something like an upside-down stool with only three legs—massive pylons jutting out from the circular main structure. It was a hub of super-science, the place where Barry and his team worked to keep the world and the universe safe from harm.
By the time he got to the lab, overlooking the river, his shoulders burned with exertion and strain. It was funny—running at Mach 4 didn’t make his legs hurt, but carrying a hundred pounds of deadweight was torture. Such were the vagaries of the speed force—if something didn’t relate to moving fast, his body reacted like anyone else’s.
The Cortex was the hub of S.T.A.R. Labs. It boasted a series of workstations with high-end computer gear, all of it tied in to the big monitors arranged around the room. Years ago, when the facility had been a research lab dedicated to the creation and study of dark matter, the Cortex had been its nerve center, where Harrison Wells and his team of intrepid mad scientists controlled and monitored the experiments.
Up until the big one. The explosion of the particle accelerator had cast a wave of dark matter over the city. That dark matter interacted with certain people, imbuing them with superpowers, and suddenly a fusillade of metahumans launched into an unsuspecting world.
“We weren’t really mad scientists,” Cisco had once said. “More like slightly perturbed.”
Nowadays, S.T.A.R. Labs’ accelerator was permanently decommissioned and off-line. The building itself served as the headquarters for Team Flash, and the Cortex was where they ran their operations.
Iris was at the communications board when Barry skidded to a halt. She had been a reporter for a while, using her contacts and her journalistic acumen to help hunt down bad guys. But shortly after the wedding, she’d left that job and come to S.T.A.R. Labs full-time, serving as a coordinator and also generally running relations between the lab and the various city agencies that relied on it. Married people were supposed to be partners, and she and Barry were partners in everything: work, life, love.
Iris usually had a big, open smile for Barry, but not today. She swept her hair out of her eyes and pressed her lips together in concern as she watched him gently lower Madame Xanadu into a nearby chair. Madame Xanadu had gone silent during the second-long superspeed run from CCPD and now stared into the distance, seeing things no one else could, captivated by whatever demons haunted her.
Demons. For all Barry knew, it was literal in her case.
“Dead dead dead dead . . .” she moaned, a line of drool snaking its way down her jawline.
Caitlin rushed over from the medical bay. “What the . . . Barry, who is this?”
“Meet Madame Xanadu.”
Now Iris gasped and joined them. “The Madame Xanadu?”
“The one and only.” Barry thought about Earth 27. “Well, in a manner of speaking.”
They watched as Caitlin performed a quick initial examination of Madame Xanadu, shining a flashlight into the moaning woman’s eyes to check for pupillary response. Those eyes, moments ago star-filled, reverted to normal as Madame Xanadu relaxed the tiniest bit under Caitlin’s care. Caitlin Snow was one of the world’s top physicians, with a healthy dose of schooling in the finer arts of super-science as well. She was compassionate and beyond competent—if she couldn’t heal it, it couldn’t be healed.
“What’s wrong with her?” Caitlin asked.
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Barry said. Iris took his hand and squeezed. Barry was once again grateful for his wife. She truly understood how mystifying and important Madame Xanadu was to him. The boardwalk seer had appeared to him as though conjured by need during his darkest hour. The evil techno-wizard from the future, Abra Kadabra, had used his future science to enthrall Barry, and Madame Xanadu had provided the key to Barry’s liberation, saving him from a life of eternal servitude.
Then when he was lost on Earth 27, her doppelgänger there had pointed him in the right direction, leading him to a coterie of allies and a way to defeat the evil speedster Johnny Quick.
She had vanished, though, and he’d never even been able to thank her. Maybe now that she was the one in dire straits . . . Maybe now he could repay his debt.
Caitlin gnawed at her bottom lip as she jotted down some notes on Madame Xanadu’s condition. “Her blood pressure is sky-high, and her pulse is racing. Pupils shrinking but reactive. I’m saying it’s shock, but it’s the worst I’ve ever seen. Barry, down in the medical supply, there’s a rack of green ampoules in the cabinet marked SEDATIVES. Can you get me—”
He was already back with a handful of them. Caitlin chuckled. “I only needed one,” she said. Barry Flashed the rest of them back and was at Caitlin’s side before she’d even injected Madame Xanadu.
“This will take the edge off and help her rest,” Caitlin said. As they watched, Madame Xanadu’s breathing slowed and her eyelids fluttered. She didn’t quite fall asleep, but she slumped in the chair, her eyes mere slits, her respiration now even and calm.
“Where’s Cisco?” Barry asked Iris. He couldn’t forget that Madame Xanadu had—while talking and breathing—said that she herself was already dead. Sounded like delusion, yes, but in Barry’s world it could also be time travel, dimension hopping, or just plain weird science. And when it came to weird science, Cisco was his first call.
“Downstairs,” Iris said. “Still . . . communing.” Her face clouded over as she said it. Barry knew why.
“None of it is about us,” he told her, taking her hands. “None of it is your fault. Look, why don’t you help Caitlin get Madame Xanadu settled into the medical bay?”
Iris nodded, touched his arm briefly, and then helped Caitlin get Madame Xanadu into a wheelchair and out the door.
“Mis amigos!” Cisco strolled into the Cortex, passing the three women on his way. His hair, long and lustrous, was tied back in a ponytail, a look that made his face seem more mature somehow. “I’ve returned! How goes it?”
“You tell me,” Barry replied. “What’s up in TV land?”
A year or so ago, Cisco had stumbled upon a shocking and existentially fraught secret—there was another timeline, nearly identical to their own.
It wasn’t a parallel Earth—it was an entire timeline with a Multiverse of its own, a slightly twisted mirror image of their reality, “an identical twin with a different haircut,” as Joe had once
described it. It was so big a discovery that they’d had to invent some new terminology. After much debate, Cisco (of course) came up with “transmultiversal version,” which they often just shortened to “TV” for convenience’s sake.
There were as many similarities between their world and the TV world as there were differences. In each reality, there’d been an invasion of super-Nazis from Earth-X that had been turned back. In each reality, Barry and Iris had wed, as had their friends Oliver and Felicity. They’d even fought some of the same villains.
But TV-Barry’s creation and negation of Flashpoint had had a ripple effect, causing some dramatic differences between the two timelines. As best they could tell, the TV crew had never faced villains like Blue Bolt, the Living Hashtag, Major Disaster, or the Construct. Cisco’s brother Dante was dead “over there.” Caitlin had a Killer Frost split personality.
And their friend H.R. Wells, from Earth 19, had sacrificed his life in the other timeline to save Iris. Shortly after they learned this, their own H.R. had left S.T.A.R. Labs for good to explore, to find both himself and his place in the world.
TV-H.R.’s death hit Iris particularly hard, since it had been to protect her TV version. Barry kept reminding her that what happened in the other timeline didn’t impact them here in theirs . . . and that the opposite was also true. Nothing she had done here had caused the other H.R.’s death.
Every few months, the two Ciscos used their vibe powers to make contact with each other and catch each other up on happenings in the different timelines. It was so far the only way they’d discovered to communicate between the two realities.
“Same old, same old,” Cisco replied. “Fast people, cool costumes, bad guys who need a punch in the jaw.”
“Has their Cisco told his Team Flash about our existence yet?”
Cisco hesitated for a moment, then shook his head, shaking his ponytail back and forth. “No. He still thinks it’s a bad idea to tell them.”
Barry frowned. “Keeping secrets—”
“We can’t judge them,” Cisco said hurriedly. “They’ve had a rough time over there. Over then. There? Then? I don’t know. Anyway: They had that whole Savitar mess that we never went through, and then they had a really tough time with the Thinker.”
Barry was bemused. “The Thinker? Really?”
The Thinker—Clifford Devoe, an insane and brilliant college professor who’d plotted to rule the world by making everyone else in it incredibly stupid—had been defeated about a year ago by Team Flash. At first, they’d been flummoxed by his ability to predict their every move. But then H.R., of all people, had come up with a solution.
“If he can predict what you’re doing,” H.R. had said, knocking back a cup of extremely hot, extremely strong, extremely expensive coffee, “then be unpredictable.”
It was easier said than done because the Thinker could process every conceivable outcome and figure out the most likely one. So Cisco had come up with the Schrödinger Cage that he built into Barry’s suit. Erwin Schrödinger was a physicist who had developed a way of explaining quantum superposition, the idea that physical objects could be in two states at once. Famously, he asked people to imagine a cat in a box. Also inside the box was a packet of poison. There was a fifty-fifty chance of the packet opening, thereby killing the cat. But until someone actually opened the box, there was no way to know if the cat was alive or dead. Until the box was opened, then, the cat was both alive and dead, existing in a state of “quantum uncertainty” until someone observed it.
The Schrödinger Cage operated on an expansion of this principle. It put Barry’s atoms into quantum superposition so that he was in multiple places at once, causing multiple interactions at the same time. Devoe could defend against what he could predict . . . but not when his predictions were mutually exclusive. Thanks to the Schrödinger Cage, Barry’s potential actions had canceled each other out, and Devoe had been helpless. Right now, the Thinker occupied a power-dampening cell at Iron Heights, where he was no smarter than any other college professor.
“There’s more,” Cisco went on. “Stuff about your daughter . . .” At Barry’s shocked look, he chuckled. “Don’t go shopping for a pregnancy test yet, you dog. It’s all time travel stuff. Anyway . . . They seem to be doing OK over there now, and we’re doing fine, so I’m happy to announce that all’s well in two different realities. That’s gotta be a record.”
Barry nodded thoughtfully. It wasn’t easy to put TV out of his mind, but he had to. It didn’t impact his life at all, but the mere knowledge of it throbbed like a bad tooth. Through Kid Flash, he’d asked the time-traveling Legends to look into the alternate timeline. He just wanted to keep a weather eye on it. So far, there seemed to be no consequences of the split his alternate version had caused, but he wanted to be sure. In his world and in his experience, trouble could come from almost any direction.
“I want you to vibe something for me,” Barry said, changing the topic.
Cisco made a show of cracking his knuckles and proceeded to blow imaginary dust off his fingertips. “These magical digits,” he said, waggling his fingers, “are at your disposal.”
• • •
Caitlin crossed her arms over her chest and cocked her hip, standing in front of Madame Xanadu’s bed to block Barry and Cisco. “I’m not letting you get those grubby vibe hands anywhere near my patient,” she said.
Barry and Cisco exchanged a look of bafflement. “Caitlin!” Cisco cried out. “Buddy! Pal! C’mon! This is what we do here at Team Flash.”
“Not today. I don’t know what this woman has experienced or what kind of meta she is. I’m not risking it.”
Barry held his hands up to placate her. “I get it. You’re being protective. And normally that’s great. But she’s in a lot of distress, and this is the only way we can help her.”
Meanwhile, Cisco was studying his hands. “Grubby?” he mouthed.
Caitlin shook her head. “We wait for her to regain her senses. To give consent to have Cisco vibe her. That’s the right thing to do. The ethical thing to do.”
“She might not regain her senses,” Barry said. “Not entirely. You hit her with a sedative, but she’s still awake.” Sure enough, in her bed, Madame Xanadu was moaning softly, her eyes half-open. Her fingers clenched and unclenched over and over. “What if she’s getting worse? Or what if she’s like this forever and we could have helped her?”
“With my incredibly clean hands,” Cisco said, a bit miffed. “I mean, I had a manicure, like, two days ago.”
Caitlin flicked her eyes back and forth between Barry and Madame Xanadu. Finally, she relented. “OK. But right now, her vitals are stable. If her blood pressure starts to spike or her heart rate jumps, I will personally tackle Cisco to break contact.”
Cisco’s eyebrows arched. “For real? Do I need my football pads?”
“Just do it,” Caitlin said, “before I change my mind.”
She stepped aside, and Cisco approached the side of the bed. He hesitated for a moment, glancing back at Barry. Barry shrugged and looked over at Caitlin, who nodded, then turned her attention to the medical monitor attached to Madame Xanadu.
Cisco reached out and touched Madame Xanadu’s bare arm with the tips of all ten fingers.
And
something
exploded
inside him, inside his mind his
brain his very core oh wow oh
God something like a rainbow made of lightning and then swirling broken shards of stars and sunlight and shadows made of rain and a mirror that could not look back and a spinning disk made of tears and and and and
“Cisco?”
Voice. From somewhere. Somewhere else. Familiar. Barry. Friend.
Cisco gritted his teeth. He leaned into the vibe. What was he seeing?
It was like watching a thousand TV channels at once. It was like having a fly’s vision, witnessing the world through a compound eye. Except each facet was different. Not a new angle on the same thing,
but a different view entirely, each “screen” a wholly unique visual and experience. He couldn’t keep them all straight in his head.
A candy shop.
A rocket, blasting off.
An endless desert of dirty white sand, clouds scudding overhead like filth floating atop stagnant water.
And then . . .
No, impossible. The perspective was all wrong . . .
He was looking up at a blood-red sky, cut and slashed by jagged bolts of black lightning. Red rain fell in sheets, as though the sky itself were bleeding. And there, among the shock and clash of lightning, barely perceptible through the haze, he thought he saw . . .
No. No! That just couldn’t be!
But it was. The sky itself was torn open. Like one of his breaches, but instead of being circular and contained, with a gently blurred circumference, this was a vicious gash across the sky. Ragged edges along the miles-tall tear. Where his breaches seemed almost gentle and unobtrusive, this one was a violent, savage rupture in the fabric of reality itself.
And within . . . Someone . . . A man . . .
“Cisco?”
He leaned forward, peering through the storm, trying to see, trying to understand . . .
And that’s when the visions dissolved, the vibe broken, the medical bay at S.T.A.R. Labs melting back into place around him. He’d been knocked to the floor, his connection to Madame Xanadu severed. Barry stood over him, a look of concern on his face.
“What the H-E-double hockey sticks, Barry?” Cisco ranted. “I was almost there! I was getting it, and you knock me down?”
Barry shook his head. “I had to. You weren’t listening to me.”
“Your whole body was seizing.” This from Caitlin, who was crouched next to him, slipping a blood pressure cuff over his left arm. “We couldn’t let you stay in the vibe. It was too intense.”
